Tag Archives: Getting old

This past Wednesday, August 2nd, two people, Betsy and Gerome, took me out to a restaurant in Tequesta called Lola’s.

It was very nice of them; it was a sort of a goodbye dinner, as I am moving on September 5th to parts abroad.

The meal was delicious — I had Fish and Chips, which perhaps jogged my memory to England — and the conversation pleasant enough.

However, at a certain point my mind drifted to another Lola, or more precisely Lolo, a girl I once knew in London in the late 70s.

I met her by chance in Hyde Park.

Coincidentally she had been on the same Laker Airways flight with me from JFK, and I’d immediately noticed her, and thought O what a Lucky Man her boyfriend was.

I was surprised the next day, as I strolled aimlessly around a large pond with querulous swans, to see her walking alone with a brown horse.

It was unusually forward of me, but I approached her — at the risk of coming across like some harassing creep — and introduced myself, in that informal way people in their 20s can pull off with ease.

I mentioned we’d traveled on the same plane together the previous day.

Hyde Park horsey set

Yes, I remember you, she said pleasantly.

I didn’t expect that.

We sorta checked each other out some, while talking, and then she said that she was just getting off work and was about to take the horse back to Hyde Park stables.

Her name, she said, was Lolo, and she spoke with a charming Danish accent with American intonations. It turned out her father was a Scandinavian diplomat, and her mother from the US.

Care for a pint? I said.

So we walked back to the stables together, and I noticed other guys in the park looking at me like I was the lucky man that day.

We found a pub somewhere near Bathurst Mews.

It went well.

As we got up to leave, she suggested that I meet her at her parent’s house the next evening. She said there a new disco style club was opening on Finchley Road. Lolo had been invited to attend, and needed a date.

I was to be it.

View from my parent’s flat on Mount Street, Late 70s

I spent the next day around Mount Street and Cadogan Square, but limited my pub crawling in preparation for my big date.

This was not an opportunity to blow.

I picked this golden mirage of a girl up at her parent’s place on a warm London summer night, and off we went. The young owner of this club — it was called Les Elites — seemed very nice and very Asian and we got in for free, thanks to Lolo, which suited me nicely, as I was sort of broke, but left me wondering how she knew this guy.

You can see in the picture below Lolo and I chilling at Les Elites, as polka dot strobe light patterns from the swirling disco ball bounced off our clothes to the thumping of a funky bass line. Things were looking up.

L-o-l-o, Lolo!

But at some point in the evening, there was trouble.

The Asian owner was married, but had some sort of English girlfriend on the side, and someone had made a pass at this woman.

There was a loud confrontation and suddenly everyone stopped moving like you see in the movies and knives were brandished in a rather menacing way by the owner and this other Asian guy who had hit on the girlfriend, so I suggested to Lolo that this might be an ideal time to depart, because I was from New York, and in Chinatown, these Asian gangster types are crazy motherfuckers.

Which we did.

Back at her parent’s place, I thought the evening’s sensual vibe had been ruined by the Ninja contretemps. Lolo poured me a generous Scotch from her father’s bar, which soothed matters.

Voyeurism on the Prom in Nice, summer 2017: I will be there in 30 days! Foto Electro Squid

We chatted about the knife thing but Lolo soon dismissed it. She talked a bit about her parents, but the unsaid was an open question hanging in the air with increasing persistence.

Would we do the nasty on our very first date?

It was well after midnight, so I asked Lolo when her parents would be returning, and she casually said, oh, they will be in Denmark for the weekend, and produced a bag of dope.

I rolled a joint, and we chatted some more — these were the days when I could be quite charmingly debonair, and capable of eliciting from time to time the undivided attention of a beautiful young woman, even when I didn’t have two farthings to my name.

Suddenly she went to the bathroom. I heard the tap water run, and the toilet flush, and when she came back, Lolo was wearing only her undies.

Her body was even more gorgeous than I had imagined it would be, but writing about this aspect of things today would make me feel like a lecher.

I want you to teach me about sex, she said. I’m not that experienced yet, and I want to learn everything.

The improbable wet dream phantasy of a virginal blonde Lolita goddess offering herself to me was not something that happened every day of the week.

Though I was only 27, and Lolo about five years younger, I did for some reason feel a wee bit pervy James Masonish at that particular moment; the feeling soon passed.

Everything, she’d said.

Everything.

Everything.

I focused back on what Betsy, who is rather attractive too, and Gerome were saying at Lola’s in provincial Tequesta.

I thought how nice it was they were inviting me for dinner, and how pathetic it felt that Betsy had not shown the slightest frisson toward me, given that most of my life, well to be bloody direct about it, I was not a bad-looking chap, and used to having an effect on attractive women, often just by glancing at them with the proverbial toothy grin.

The Come Hither, stoner look of my late 20s. Notice I wore the same vest when I took Lolo to Les Elites.

And now, I was the older guy being given a pleasant sendoff before he went overseas, and there would no everything in store for this gaffer, not that night, or perhaps any other ever again.